Content marketing is not only about creation and engagement, but also about understanding your audience, distribution of the materials and measuring their performance: the 3 most overlooked and underestimated parts of the process. Neglecting these can truly undermine your efforts! To avoid such situation, combine content marketing […]

This post on Michael Brenner’s Marketing Insider blog is spot on. Guest author Grzegorz Błażewicz explains the different problems that can be solved by automation: research, distribution and measurement.

While content marketing automation can be seen as an opportunity right now, I would make a stronger point that it actually is an obligation.

1. Research

Research is critical to create good content. Content marketing is about being the best answer or one of the best answers to your customers’ questions. How can you be the best answer without researching what’s out there? And if you need to understand what’s out there you need to automate content discovery.

2. Distribution

No content ever generated traffic without getting some distribution first. It’s not “build it and they will come”. But in a world of information overload where everybody’s embracing content marketing, optimizing content distribution is a priority. This means sharing multiple times on social media, generating email automatically and amplifying successful content to extend its lifetime. In this study, we actually measured how much more results you could generate through organic content amplification – without any paid distribution budget. And again, there’s no way you can keep track manually of:

– all the pieces of content you need to share and distribute via email,

– how many times you’ve shared or emailed them,

– which ones deserve to keep being distributed and which ones shouldn’t.

3. Measuring

Finally, measuring content performance is the key to ROI. Again, it’s imperative as if you don’t measure it, you won’t be able to make it a sustainable and valuable strategy for your business. Here again, it’s impossible to crunch numbers better than a computer. More than that: tracking systems need to be in place to enable the proper attribution of business KPI’s to content, aka content marketing analytics.

Conclusion

Humans will and need to stay in the picture of course. While some automated content creation technology starts to be used for sports and finance, it’s not capable of creating content for sophisticated buying processes. But the key is to leverage technology and automation for what it’s good at and focus our efforts on creativity and strategy – making our content marketing both human and efficient.

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